UNESCO World Heritage Committee Keeps Leuser Ecosystem on World Heritage in Danger List

In Berlin this month, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee meeting this month reconfirmed that the Sumatran Heritage of Indonesia UNESCO World Heritage Site is ‘At Risk’.

Leuser Ecosystem in Sumatra, Indonesia has been on UNESCO’s “List of World Heritage in Danger’’ since 2011 due to ongoing destruction of its rainforest ecosystem.

Today, a wave of major new industrial projects being fast tracked for development within the Leuser Ecosystem threaten to destroy the integrity of the site, despite the fact that they will violate Indonesian laws and make a mockery of the World Heritage Site listing.

Panut Hadisiswoyo, Director of Orangutan Information Centre, commented, “Our critique highlights numerous serious threats to Leuser’s forests. They include several new hydropower dams and geothermal energy plants being proposed in critical areas, a continued lack of law enforcement throughout the region and the devastating construction of new roads that carve up and fragment forests and wildlife populations rendering them increasingly vulnerable to extinction.

The threats have never been so severe for the last place on Earth where orangutans, rhinos, tigers and elephants still live together in the wild. We implore the World Heritage Centre to take urgent steps to prevent all these plans being implemented in Leuser.”

A number of large hydroelectric dams have been proposed inside and around the World Heritage Site that would severely threaten the integrity of the Leuser Ecosystem and considerably undermine its Outstanding Universal Values.

“Mega power projects like these, in and around the Leuser Ecosystem, are not in the best interests of Aceh’s people either. Not only do they lead to dependence on just a few large plants, they also devastate entire forested regions with all the roads and infrastructure they need, leading to more frequent and more intense environmental disasters, a problem from which the region already suffers disproportionately. In contrast, micro hydro power generation schemes have been shown to be far more effective, ecologically sensitive, and sustainable solutions to northern Sumatra’s energy issues.

Who in their right mind would want to build giant hydroelectricity schemes storing millions of tons of water behind concrete walls in one of the world’s most active earthquake zones with communities living downstream in the floodplain, it’s a recipe for even more disasters!” Panut Hadisiswoyo concluded.

Dr Ian Singleton, Director of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme stated “The Leuser Ecosystem is almost certainly the largest remaining contiguous rainforest ecosystem in the whole of SE Asia. It’s also the last real hope for the survival of some of the world’s most iconic large mammal species, like the Sumatran tiger, elephant, rhino and orangutan, and many other rare and threatened species, many of which, like these are endemic to the region and found nowhere else on the planet.

The report submitted to the World Heritage Centre also highlights ongoing failure of law enforcement, and the ‘illegal’ Aceh spatial plan which seeks to remove the protection status of the Leuser Ecosystem, which is still being argued in court.

A 2016 World Heritage Committee Decision “considers that the designation of buffer zones should include key areas for wildlife in the Leuser Ecosystem as well as ecological corridors connecting these areas with the property to ensure these are legally protected, and encourages the State Party to seek the advice of the World Heritage Centre and IUCN to identify the areas in the Leuser Ecosystem that are crucially important to ensure the integrity of the property.”

The Leuser Ecosystem has long been beset by conversion by oil palm plantation companies and fragmentation by roads as well as illegal logging, mining and wildlife poaching.

Environmental organizations and community groups have been campaigning for over 3 years for the rejection and revision of the Aceh provincial government’s Spatial Land Use Plan, which sets out a development pathway for the province that completely ignores the existence of the Leuser Ecosystem, despite it being a National Strategic Area under Indonesian law, within which no developments that threaten its environmental function are permitted.